How to Meditate with Your Kids

Learn how to meditate with your kids from yoga instructor Lisa Dawn Angerame in this Howcast video.

Transcript

Lisa: Hi, I'm Lisa Dawn Angerame. I'm one of the founding partners of Nava NYC. A collective of nine yoga and meditation teachers in New York City. Our website is www.navanyc.com. Today I will be talking to you about meditation. There is nothing more than to practice meditation with your children. We teach our children to play soccer, to paint, but we should teach our children how to focus the mind. It gives them the technique to deal with stress and anxiety and things that come up that is almost inexplicable. When my son was fifteen months old, we began to meditate with him in the area with us. We setup a cushion on either side.

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We kind of blocked him off from wandering away, and he sat in between us. And in the beginning he would climb on us, touch our faces, but by the end of the seven minutes that we start our timer for, he sat quietly, feeling the energetic exchange between my husband and myself. So depending on the age of your children when you start, there are a few different ways that you can do this. If they're still crawling, like I said, block off an area. If they're already walking, block off an area. If they're a little older and you feel like they're ready to sit, get them their own meditation cushion and have them sit with you. All of you knee to knee, kind of in a little family circle. And this will help them understand the energetic exchange that is about to happen and teach them about focus.

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That when they inhale they should say inhale, and when they exhale they can say exhale. It gives them a way to find focus instead of distractions that come up. In the beginning, your kids might not even get the fact that they're sitting there trying to focus their mind. But over time, for five or seven minutes each day, they will begin to realize the power of finding calm and quiet and focus. So teach them, on the inhale say let, on the exhale say go. Tell them to let go of anything that they're clinging onto from the day. Something that happened in school, something that happened on the playground. It gives them a technique to deal with the anxiety. So commit to this as a regular family practice and when you're done and the timer goes off, acknowledge each other and ask "Did anything come up for you. Is there anything you'd like to talk about?" And this way the meditation gets more powerful as time goes on.